Athens, Modern Greek Athínai, Ancient Greek Athēnai, historic city and capital of Greece. Many of Classical civilization’s intellectual and artistic ideas originated there, and the city is generally considered to be the birthplace of Western civilization.

Athens lies 5 miles (8 km) from the Bay of Phaleron, an inlet of the Aegean (Aigaíon) Sea where Piraeus (Piraiévs), the port of Athens, is situated, in a mountain-girt arid basin divided north-south by a line of hills. Greater Athens has an area of 165 square miles (427 square km). The Kifisós River, only a trickle in summer, flows through the western half; the Ilisós River, often dry, traverses the eastern half. The surrounding mountains—Párnis, 4,636 feet (1,413 metres); Pentelicus (Pendéli), 3,631 feet; Hymettos (Imittós), 3,365 feet; and Aigáleon, 1,535 feet—add to the impression of barrenness. Yet such considerations are superficial when compared with the fecundity of Athens’s bequests to the world, such as its philosophy, its architecture, its literature, and its political ideals.

Physical and human geography

Character of the city

Athens, with its tall buildings and contemporary shops, is the first European city when approached from the Middle East. When approached from the west, from elsewhere in Europe, what strikes the visitor is the influence of the East—in the food, music, and clamorous street life—perhaps vestiges of a time when Athens was divorced from European society under the yoke of Ottoman rule. Nevertheless, it is wrong to say that Athens is a mixture of East and West: it is Greek and, more particularly, Athenian. The city, after all, nurtured Western civilization thousands of years ago. Athens remains on the world stage to this day, most recently as the designated host of the 2004 Olympic Games.

Some three centuries after the death of Pericles (429 bce), Athenians entered upon a period of bondage that lasted almost 2,000 years. The city was freed in 1833, and in the following 170 years it was the scene of more than a dozen revolutions, another brutal foreign occupation, and a civil war of especial savagery. This long history of passion and suffering has had considerable effect on the Athenian character. The core of that character is an implacable will to survive, buttressed by a profound sense of loyalty (especially to the family) and patriotism. The Greek Orthodox Church, which is directed by a synod sitting in Athens, was a main force in keeping alive the Greek language, tradition, and literature when such things were forbidden, and most people still support it.

The millennia of oppression, instead of driving the Athenians into obtuse moroseness, have honed their wit and rendered them tough but supple, while centuries of privation have only preserved their warmth and generosity. The long oral tradition, alive even under the invader, has reflected and stimulated a taste for rich talk. Of course, the poetic impulse to make a good story better leads to considerable exaggeration in daily conversation, suiting a vanity that goes with a sharp-edged sense of personal and family honour and the spoiling of children. The ancient heroes, too, were vain about both themselves and honour, boasting as much about outwitting the enemy as about outfighting him.

The landscape

Climate

The climate of Athens is benign: frost is rare (the minimum temperature is 32 °F, or 0 °C) and snow seldom lies, while the summers, though hot (maximum temperature is 99 °F, or 37 °C), are dry, and a fresh northeasterly wind often blows by day. The nights are cool. The climate of the city permits outdoor activity the year round and has had an important effect on both the style of architecture and the life and political institutions of the city.

In 1833 there was almost no Athens at all. During the fight for independence, it had been entirely evacuated in 1827, and six years later it held perhaps 4,000 people in the straggle of little houses on the north slope below the Acropolis. The newly imported king of the Hellenes, Otto, the 18-year-old son of Louis I of Bavaria, was installed in the only two-story stone house, while his German architects hurried ahead with plans for a palace and a new Athens far out in the fields.

Below the well-sited but very plain palace, a large garden square, Síntagma (Constitution) Square, was laid out. Today it is garnished in the tourist season with some of Europe’s most luxurious cafe chairs, and at all seasons it is hemmed in by tall new buildings and elderly luxury hotels. Broad avenues were created and are still the city centre’s principal thoroughfares (Stadíou and Panepistimíou [Elefthérios Venizélou]), between which an orderly grid of narrow side streets was laid out. The housing that developed was generally the sort of architecture familiar in Victorian London: solid, porched, rather imposing, the later imitations graceless and monotonous. In Athens it is called the Ottonian style, but there is little of it left as the centre encroaches on old residential areas.

Once the new capital was established, the city grew at a regular rate of about 7 percent a year, soon reaching 50,000 inhabitants, a figure not much exceeded in the days of Athens’s greatest power and glory. By 1907 the municipality had a population of 167,479. Omónia (Harmony) Square had been built at the western end of the two main streets, with other broad avenues radiating from it, but it did not develop as the hoped-for balance to Síntagma.

By then the railway to Piraeus had been built, its station near the antique Agora. Indeed, the city plan projected a logical growth southward along this axis, but a real estate developer beckoned northward—the National Archaeological Museum is out this way—and the newly rich followed. The palace garden almost touched the Arch of Hadrian and the 15 mammoth columns (some of them 7 feet 10 inches in diameter) of the temple of Olympian Zeus, last of the Classical buildings built in Athens, and beyond lay empty fields. The slopes of Mount Likavittós, outside the town limits, were still pine-clad. Since then the garden has become one of the painfully rare public parks in Athens. Likavittós now rears up in the middle of the city (as if Hyde Park or Central Park were a 1,112-foot mountain), its lower slopes built upon and many of the trees felled for a road leading to a cog railway and restaurant.

Along Panepistimíou Street rose the Academy of Athens, in marble from Mount Pentelicus, its pediments and colonnades gilded. Its new neighbours were the University of Athens (refounded in 1837), the colonnade adorned with paintings, and the National Library. All were done in Greek Revival style by the court’s German architects. A new Royal Palace (now the Presidential Residence) was built during 1891–97, a little southeast of the old (which is now a Parliament house) on Herodes Atticus Street. This leads to the 70,000-seat Panathenaic (Athens) Stadium, reconstructed by an expatriate Greek millionaire in time for the revival of the Olympic Games in 1896.

In 1921 the orderly progress of Athens was overturned and haphazard development began, for ethnic minorities were exchanged between Greece and Turkey, and approximately 1,500,000 Greeks, most of them penniless, came home from Asia Minor. Despite government efforts to resettle them elsewhere, many swarmed into shantytowns around the fringes of Athens and Piraeus, and the area’s population soared from 473,000 to 718,000. After that the city began to spread in two directions, south toward Piraeus and north toward the village of Kifisiá, which first became a smart suburb when Herodes Atticus built his villa there in the 1st century bce.

In the 1940s hideous things happened in Athens. During the German occupation many people died from starvation, and the city began to fall apart from lack of maintenance. When the Germans left, part of the Allied-equipped resistance refused to lay down its arms, and the civil war began. For a while the government held only the Parliament building, neighbouring embassies, and a part of Síntagma Square, while the palace garden was used as a common grave.

A construction boom began in the 1950s. New apartment houses pushing up everywhere erased old social boundaries (though the Kolonáki district on the southeast slope of Likavittós remained an enclave of respectable fortunes), and villages that had been attached to the city in the previous expansion lost their physical and political identities. A network of major highways was thrown up. The west side of the historic olive grove by the Kifisós River was shorn, and hillside greenery began to disappear under housing, either unauthorized or made legal through political skulduggery. Open space vanished, without provision for parks, playgrounds, or even schools, and Athens spread down to the sea by Glifádha, joining up with Piraeus. Piraeus itself was transformed from one of the world’s celebrated honky-tonk ports into a clean, newly built, flower-decorated city.

The Athens master plan was enlarged several times to keep pace with spread, which by 1964 had already attained 75 square miles, with a built-up area of 17 square miles outside the plan altogether. Land values in the centre quadrupled, then octupled, and rose proportionately elsewhere. Traffic increased almost to the saturation point at rush hours, and the city continued to sprawl beyond its planned limits. As international tourism increased, Ellinikón Airport, south of the city, was expanded and modernized.

The city water supply from an artificial lake at Marathon was insufficient to supply the new building construction, and the Mórnos River 110 miles to the northwest was dammed and tapped. Installation of a modern sewer system was undertaken, together with controls to check the floods that roar into Athens when heavy rains pour off the denuded mountains.

Traditional features

The older Athens has not entirely disappeared in all this hubbub. Older men may have given up smoking hookahs in shadowy cafes but not their 33-bead kombouloi (“worry beads”), which were acquired from the Turks. Old Athens occupies the six streets sidling off Monastiráki Square, by the excavated Agora. Tiny open-fronted shops are hung with tinselled folk costumes and all of the monuments of Athens reproduced in copper, plaster, plastic, and paint. There is an alley of antique dealers, a street of smithies, one of hardware merchants, and another of wildly assorted miscellany.

Close to this lively quarter is the Pláka, on the north slope of the Acropolis. Small, one-story houses, dating from about the time of independence, are clustered together up the hillside in peasant simplicity. There are appropriately tiny squares with tavernas, once celebrated for their folk music, dancing, and simple fare. There are vine-covered pergolas and some unpaved streets too narrow for cars. The baths built by the Turks still function morning and afternoon, but the bouzouki, a local relative of the lute, is giving way to the electric guitar. The taverna signs are multilingual, and the ubiquitous kitchen chair is being replaced by the plastic-ribbed restaurant seat. Progress laps at the Pláka like a vengeful sea, but the Acropolis is just up above, just under the stars.

The Acropolis

Many of Athens’s bequests (all, if the theatre of Herodes Atticus may be regarded as an embodiment of the city’s literature) to the world are expressed in and around the natural centre of Athens, the Acropolis (designated a World Heritage site in 1987). Rising some 500 feet above sea level, with springs near the base and a single approach, the Acropolis was an obvious choice of citadel and sanctuary from earliest times. That it could be something more is evidenced in the Parthenon, one of the brightest jewels in humankind’s, let alone Athens’s, treasury.

As deceptively simple as Socrates’ conversation, this columned, oblong temple is the expression—without a trace of strain or conflict—of a human ideal of clarity and unity. The architectural genius is concentrated in the exterior, for within was a shelter for the goddess Athena—the patroness who lent her name to the city—not a place for mass worship. Its spiritual quality, the sensation of being almost afloat, is enhanced by the lack of a single straight vertical line in the peristyle (the surrounding colonnade); each vertical is almost imperceptibly bowed, theoretically meeting some 11,500 feet in the sky. The columns, of diminishing thickness toward the centre of the colonnade, with diminishing space between them, lean toward the centre, too; all these differences are virtually invisible to the beholder. Even the 20 flutings of each column diminish in width as they rise, and the humblest details of craftsmanship are perfect.

On the northeast corner of the interior are faint traces of Christian wall paintings dating from the temple’s service as the Church of St. Mary, and in the southwest corner of the porch is the stair leading to the minaret that was added when the building was a Turkish mosque. The Parthenon was also used as a powder magazine, when, on September 26, 1687, Venetian artillery, attacking the Turks from the Hill of the Muses, scored a direct hit. A member of the party with the field commander, General Königsmark, wrote, “How it dismayed His Excellency to destroy the beautiful temple which had existed three thousand years!” Conversely, Francesco Morosini, the commander in chief, when reporting to the Venetian government, called it “a fortunate shot.” Wishing to bring home more than just good news, he also tried to lower Athena’s horses in the centre of the west pediment, but his men’s dexterity was not as highly developed as their marksmanship, and the masterpieces were smashed to bits on the rock below.

Poseidon, Apollo, and Artemis, marble relief, portion of the east section of the Parthenon frieze, …

Spectrum Colour Library/Heritage-Images

The Turks regained possession of the Acropolis the following year and later began selling souvenirs to Europeans. The duc de Choiseul, formerly French ambassador in Constantinople, picked up a piece of the frieze and two metopes. In 1801 the British ambassador, Lord Elgin, arrived with an imperial decree permitting him to pull down Turkish houses on the Acropolis to seek fragments of sculpture. Among the 50 pieces he took home (the shipping charges were £75,000, a huge sum for those days) was most of the remaining Parthenon sculpture, which he later sold to the British Museum for £35,000. The Greeks have forgiven the clumsiness of the Venetian engineers, the accuracy of Venetian cannoneers, and the vandalism of the Turks, but they still nurture rancour against Elgin. He also removed one of the caryatids from the Erechtheum, a temple of Athena called after a shrine dedicated to the legendary king Erechtheus or to Poseidon Erechtheus, but replaced it with a plaster cast. From London he sent a town clock for Athens, duly erected in the Agora and lost in the fire of 1885. The Erechtheum (5th century bce), which later became a church under the Byzantines and subsequently the Turkish commander’s harem, was originally dedicated to both Athena and Poseidon and was the most venerated of the Acropolis temples.

Caryatids supporting the porch of the Erechtheum, on the Acropolis in Athens, Greece. Some scholars …

The Propylaea, the matchless entryway into the Acropolis, was the only opening in the surrounding wall. Just in front of it and to the left is the 27-foot-high pedestal for the thank offering to Agrippa, the victor of the Battle of Actium, who interceded for Athens, which had supported the loser, Mark Antony. To the right was the temple of Athena Nike (Giver of Victory), 27 feet long and 18 1/2 feet wide, which stood untouched until the Turks demolished it in 1686 to use the stones as defenses against the Venetians. In 1836 it was badly restored, and 100 years later its foundations began to slip into previously undiscovered Turkish cisterns, revealing the 6th-century foundations of Peisistratus’s earlier shrine to Artemis Epipyrgidea (Artemis on the Tower). The temple was then more accurately reconstructed. The northern wing of the Propylaea, the Pinakotheke, was used by the Frankish dukes, who reconstructed the interior to make a two-story building. In the 12th century Greek Orthodox bishops lived in the Pinakotheke, and in the 14th century the dynasty of Athenian dukes from Florence turned the Propylaea into a fortified castle with a Tuscan tower, which Heinrich Schliemann, the German excavator who discovered Troy, paid to have dismantled in 1875.

Learn about the buildings of the Acropolis of Athens, Greece, particularly the Propylaeum, the …

When the Turks, who had occupied Athens since 1456, departed, they left the monuments in a state of ruin, the ground covered with garden plots, and several hundred small huts. After Greece won its independence, Otto, the first king of the Hellenes, had everything that postdated the Classical period swept away, set scholars to work identifying the remains, and encouraged some reconstruction.

According to Pausanias, the Greek traveller and geographer of the 2nd century ce, the colossal 30-foot-high bronze seated statue of Athena Promachos (Athena Who Fights in the Foremost Ranks), by the 5th-century-bce Athenian sculptor Phidias, was set up in the open behind the Propylaea, her gleaming helmet and spear visible to mariners off Cape Sunium (Soúnion) 30 miles away. The 6th-century Byzantine emperor Justinian carried the statue off to Constantinople (now Istanbul), just as Phidias’s ivory and gold statue of Athena had been taken from the Parthenon. Both of these masterpieces were lost to other looters in the Crusaders’ sack of Constantinople in 1204. Other statues stood in profusion amid small temples, such as the sculptor Myron’s group of Marsyas and Athena, his Perseus, and his heifer; Phidias’s Lemnian Athena and his Pericles; and a gigantic bronze effigy of the Trojan horse. There was an altar to Athena Hygeia (the Health Giver), a precinct sacred to the goddess Artemis Brauronia (named after a statue of her, brought from the town of Brauron), the Pandroseum (a building named after Pandrosos, a girl associated with Athena in legend), where the sacred olive tree of Athena grew, and beyond the Parthenon the great altar of Athena.

Other notable buildings

Below the Acropolis sanctuary, on the southwest slope of the hill, Herodes Atticus, a rich Roman, built a 5,000-seat odeum as a memorial to his wife in 161 ce. A conventional Roman theatre except that the semicircular auditorium was hollowed out of the rock, it was roofed in cedar and had a three-story facade of arches. Repaired but roofless, it is now used for the Athens summer festival of music and drama. A 300-yard-long portico stretching toward the Theatre of Dionysus had been built some 300 years earlier. The Dionysiac theatre itself, scooped out of the south slope early in the 5th century, replaced the Agora stage as the drama centre. It also replaced the Pnyx as the meeting place for the popular assembly. Rebuilt many times, the ruined theatre now visible is largely Roman, the last construction work on the stage probably dating from the early 3rd century ce. The Dionysia, the spring festival, which drew crowds from many parts of Greece and colonies in Asia Minor and Italy, was held in this theatre, which had 13,000 seats in 67 rows. The jury had larger front seats and the ecclesiastical dignitaries small stone thrones, on which their titles can still be read. Three tragic and four comic plays were presented in competition for the prize. Production costs were met by private sponsors who, when their choruses won the prize tripod, displayed it in an elaborate memorial in the Street of Tripods to the east of the theatre. The only one of these monuments still standing is that of Lysicrates, erected 334 bce, a small circular temple 21 1/2 feet high, its six columns an early example of the Corinthian order. The monument was preserved through incorporation into a convent (in which the English poet Lord Byron had a study) and influenced British Georgian and Regency architecture through the engravings of the Edinburgh artist “Athenian” Stuart. Farther east lay the Odeum of Pericles, and to the west are traces (420 bce) of the precinct of Asclepius, the god of healing, which took the form of a hospital portico for patients and temples decorated with votive reliefs.

Odeum, Athens, built by Herodes Atticus in 161 ce as a memorial to his wife.

A. Vergani/DeA Picture Library

On the Hill of Ares, the god of war, to the right of the descent from the Propylaea, a legendary jury of gods spared Ares from execution for the murder of the sea god Poseidon’s son. Trials for homicide continued to be heard on this hill through the ages, and the Supreme Court of Greece still bears the name.

Across Apostólou Pávlou (Apostle Paul Avenue) are the Hill of the Nymphs, where an Austro-Greek, Baron Sina, built an observatory in 1842; the Hill of the Muses, crowned with the remains of the marble monument to Philopappus, a Syrian who was Roman consul in the 2nd century ce; and the middle hill, the Pnyx (Tightly Crowded Together), the meeting place of the Ecclesia, the assembly of 18,000 citizens who heard the great Athenian orators. (In fact, attendance of more than 5,000 persons was rare at any gathering, but the Pnyx would still have been crowded.)

The Agora

The avenue leads down to the Agora, which the American School of Classical Studies started restoring in 1931, paying $2.5 million compensation to the several hundred families living there. Financed by, among others, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Marshall Plan, and the Greek government, the work went on until 1960. It includes what has been called “the pitiless replica of a 180-columned portico of the 2nd century bc,” which serves as a museum.

At the approaches to the Agora is the best-preserved of all Greek temples, the Theseum (5th century bce). Although virtually intact and absolutely genuine, it has all the deadness of a latter-day reproduction. The beauty, the mystery, and the genius that render the Parthenon incandescent eluded the architects and builders of the Theseum.

The Horologium and the Orthodox cathedrals

Another monument is the octagonal, 42-foot-high marble Horologium of Andronicus of Cyrrhus, usually called the Tower of the Winds because each side bears a weather-beaten figure of the wind from that particular compass point. It used to have a sundial, a water clock for telling the hour on cloudy days, and a weather vane. The Turks left it unchanged, believing it to be the tomb of two local prophets, Sakhratis and Aflatun (Socrates and Plato).

In the shadow of the 19th-century, neo-Byzantine Greek Orthodox Cathedral (Mitrópolis) nestles the 12th-century Mitrópolis, Áyios Elefthérios, one of three genuine Byzantine churches still surviving. It is red brick, like the others, and tiny. Its Pentelic marble is ruddied with age, and its outer walls are artfully, if promiscuously, decorated with Classical Greek tidbits: panels, votive tablets, and morsels of frieze. Like its sisters, this retired cathedral is charming, unassuming, and comforting.

The people

The population of Greater Athens increased considerably after the war of independence in the early 1830s. The rapid growth was largely attributable to the great influx of refugees from Asia Minor in the early 1920s and the migration of rural inhabitants from the provinces during World War II and the communist rebellion (1946–49). By the 1960s Athens had become a bustling cosmopolitan city. Almost all Greeks adhere to the Eastern (Greek) Orthodox faith.

The economy

Industry and trade

Since World War I Athens has become the hub of all mercantile business, export and import. With Piraeus it is the most important manufacturing city in Greece. Athens accounts for half of the jobs in industry and handicrafts, and earnings are much higher than the national average. There are cloth and cotton mills, distilleries, breweries, potteries, flour mills, soap factories, tanneries, chemical works, and carpet factories. Exports include olive oil, tomato products, wine, cement, bauxite, and textile manufactures. Publishing enterprises are important.

The brilliant Attic light, however, is now dimmed by the pall of air pollution hovering over the city. To discourage new factories from further adding to the problem and to stimulate the economic growth of other regions, an industrial wage tax has been imposed in the Athens area, and tax incentives have been offered to new factories set up in other areas.

Transportation and shipping

Athens accounts for more than half of the cars, trucks, and buses in use in the nation. Furthermore, the number of merchant ships registered in Greece (mostly at Piraeus, the country’s largest port) has increased as Greek shipowners, since the late 1960s, have answered the government’s call to bring their foreign-registered ships home (though many Greek ships remain under other flags). Scores of shipping offices have opened in refurbished Piraeus, while on weekends shipping magnates sail to the nearby islands of Hydra and Spetse in chrome-fitted luxury yachts, flying Panamanian and Liberian flags.

The metropolitan transit system includes an electrified rail line, buses, and trolleys. The electric railway, which connects Piraeus in the south with the suburb of Kifisiá in the north, runs underground within Athens proper. Larissa, the main railway station, links the city with the rest of the country and the continent.

Britannica Web sites

Athens is the capital of Greece, a country of Southern Europe. The city is located on the Greek mainland. Mountains surround Athens on three sides. Athens was the most important of the city-states of ancient Greece.

The city of Athens was the birthplace of Western civilization and is still one of Europe’s great cities. In ancient times it was the most important Greek city-state. Today it is the capital and chief center of commerce and industry of Greece. The city attracts a large number of tourists each year to visit its historic sites that date to ancient times.